Saturday, September 26, 2015

Lesson Theme: Transportation!

Whew! We have had a rough September so far (travel, unexpected bad news, illness and loss of a loved pet, etc.). However, I wanted to make sure I posted at least one of our themes for this month before October sets in!

This is a shot of our morning board. We made some word webs for our transportation topic and sorted vehicles according to land, water, air types (I believe I saw this activity on Pinterest but do not remember where).

I bought one of these at Mardel and posted it outside the classroom door. The idea was for the kids to stop before entering the classroom and either read sight words (Mr. J) or translate Latin words (Miss A).

This was another Mardel purchase, and I posted it near our dining area. I wanted the kids to practice their math facts before eating. I color coded the facts for each child so he/she would know which ones to practice.

I turned some stickers into a graphing game. We would roll the dice and graph what came up. The stickers are on small green Post-it notes, which made it easy to remove and play more than once.

I found this cute poem here (along with other transportation idea gems), and we made a stoplight to go along with it by gluing tissue paper behind the cutout circles. Inspiration for the stoplight can be seen here.

Speaking of stoplights, this was part of lunch one day. I toasted the bread and cut out the circles using a round cookie cutter. The red "light" is tomato. The yellow "light" is cooked egg (whipped up an egg and poured some in the circle to cook while the bread was toasting in the skillet). The green "light" is avocado.

We played a memory game with some road signs and then added them to a city we made. Inspiration came from this post.

Another fun idea for this activity is to have the kids practice giving directions to each other using the words "left" and "right" as they use small cars to visit different buildings or deliver items.

We read "If I Built a Car" and then practiced building our own lego cars (inspired by this post).

We painted with car wheels (inspiration here), but I added a twist by giving the kids driving directions. The kids had to dip the car wheels in paint and then drive from one letter's house to the next until they had completed the word. Then they would use a different color paint for another word, etc. Mr. J practiced sight words while Miss A practiced some spelling words. :) We did this over a few days so that the paint would have time to dry (didn't want them crawling over wet paint to get to a letter).

Lest you think we only focused on land transportation, here are a couple of water activities we did as well. We performed a "sink or float" activity with a variety of materials.

Based on the data collected from that experiment, we chose what material might float the best and made a small boat with it (see boat in activity below). The sail is made from cloth and craft sticks. The bottom is a foam meat tray that a grocer was sweet enough to give us.

Loved this foil river idea. I added a twist by putting cards with words by the river. The kids had to either read the sight words (Mr. J) or translate the Latin words (Miss A) as the boat sailed along. The idea was to race the boat to see whether the child would reach the end of the words (and river) first or whether the boat would be the winner.

While I had intended to do more with air transportation, life got in the way. Those on Facebook already know that we had a beloved pet pass away after a very expensive and emotional week of caring for her during her mysterious illness (which we now know was probably a very aggressive form of cancer).

While we are glad she is no longer suffering, it was hard on the family to lose her. I basically cancelled school the next day and spent that time grieving and desperately trying to pack everyone for a trip we were scheduled to take the following morning.

So, while we did not do many activities or crafts for air transportation, we DID actually go to an airport and fly on an airplane which I consider a pretty cool grand finale for our transportation theme!!! :)

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Married to an incredible man and mother of two amazing children, I am also a former school teacher and a current homeschool teacher! Sharing child-related, schooling, and homeschooling ideas is what I do here. I hope that after dropping by, you leave with a bright smile on your face hinting at the fresh sparkle of a mind inspired (YOURS)! :)

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